And this was, after all, the whole point of my abode. Hiding and, of course, plotting revenge. I was an angry army of one, as I will explain shortly. I spent my days poring over maps, imagining a way to destroy my enemies and march out of their city carrying their heads on flaming spears, shock and surprise frozen to their dead-dead-dead faces. So I was angry, hopeless, drunk in the heat, and ceaselessly plotting a solo military conquest that I knew could not and would not ever come to fruition.
My existence in the desert wasn’t all cruel and unusual punishment, however. Not twenty-five miles away there was a freshwater spring, eking its way out of the Sylvania mountain peaks, which I could see to the North from my back porch even on a dusty day. Sometimes hummingbirds spun about in the back, at night I could sometimes spy a meteor or two if I looked closely, in the Spring I’d get purple wildflowers, and in the winter a little cleansing snow if I were lucky. And life was occasionally tolerable in other ways, mostly as a result of a racket I’d dreamed up, which had turned out to be a good one. (I’ll get to that eventually.)
So I was infamous, certainly, but I was apparently not too infamous for Hester Smith[2], who pounded on my door as the sun prepared to set, sweating and hollering in the still-oppressive heat. She had arrived on a conspicuously arthritic mule, which she’d bought in the little town of Penville on the outskirts of the desert, and which had trudged an admirable number of perilous miles till, as dusk loomed, men in black appeared on the horizon not half a mile from my shack.
“Watt O’Hugh!” she called, pounding on the door.
I shouted back at her that I warn’t Watt O’Hugh, that I’d never heard of Watt O’Hugh, and that my name was Hugh Watt, who was an entirely different person.
She kicked in the door and stood before me, five foot ten inches tall, a Colored woman, lean and muscular, and nearly thirty years of age, in my estimation. She was dressed in a blue work shirt and denim pants, and a dirty white cowboy hat, which shaded her face from the sun. The mule collapsed behind her, and her bag dropped into the sand.
Hester was breathing heavily in the heat of my white sandy sun-soaked world, and something in her face or in her eyes seemed to remind me of someone I’d known a long time ago. Then I realized that what I was recognizing was fear and desperation, which, when I greeted it face to face, seemed like an old friend.
“I’m Hester,” she said, which is how I came to have learnt her name.
I sleepily criticized her for destroying my such-as-it-was door, but without much passion.
I took another swig from my bottle, and she told me that men were chasing her and were set to kill her if they caught her, and that she was sorry, but now that she was here in my home, they’d probably kill me too, these men who were chasing her.
My gut instinct was that Hester was on the side of goodness and light in this particular kerfuffle, and so I figured that I had no choice but to absquatulate and to take her with me.
“Well then,” I said with a shrug.
I put on my hat, slipped my bottle into my pocket and, though I had no intention of shooting anyone to-day, I grabbed my barking-iron just in case.
I stepped outside, where I could see them in the distance, three dusty ink smudges thundering towards me from the hot-hazy far-lands.
The mule lay on his side. He kicked at the air, gasped, coughed, and stopped breathing.
Hester knelt down beside him. She shook her head. She frowned.
“I guess that mule can’t gallop,” I said.
“He was a beautiful animal,” she said. “Not very strong. Not much to look at. But loyal and brave. A mule with a beautiful soul. He died to save me.”
I nodded.
“I have a horse,” I said.
“You don’t want to stay and fight?” she asked me as she stood. “Protect the so-to-speak homestead?”
I pointed out that the homestead warn’t much of one, and Hester pointed out that there was a principle involved.
“No reason to kill a man if there’s no reason to kill a man,” I replied. This was a little adage that I liked to repeat from time-to-time, usually when I was behaving cowardly like, and now it served as a countervailing principle to Hester’s simplistic call to “protect” the “homestead.” Watt O’Hugh’s Maxim and First Corollary, as I dubbed it[3], could give my otherwise inexcusable pusillanimity a philosophical underpinning that sounded both compassionate and paradoxically valiant, in its way, and even tended to impress the lady-folk, which was otherwise hard for a gentleman to do while he was running away from danger.
“What about your ghosts?” she asked me, and I said that my ghosts did not like taking life either. Their own lives violently ripped from them back in 1863, my ghosts were pacifists who fought only if necessary. If I were ever to pick a fight that my ghosts deemed unnecessary or unjust, they would leave me, my aim would falter, and I would die.
The distant figures grew slightly larger against a hazy ball of fire on the western horizon.
“You comin’?” I asked, and the two of us leaped onto my bay gelding, who loyally galloped east, and I realize now, as I had known then, that while I had never bothered to name him, he was my only friend, in those days. I’d bought my horse from a little ranching village in the Medicine Bow Range, right after I’d escaped from the penitentiary in Wyoming, a strong warrior beast who seemed to have sprung alive from the imagination of some painter who’d died hundreds of years ago, a steed whose coat was the color of a renaissance palette.[4]
Pounding on the desert sand and hard rocks, with the mountains looking down on me like a painted backdrop, just shimmering in the distance, the heat crushing down from above and swamping my lungs, Hester holding onto me tight, the sun scorching my skin like fire, this cracked, shimmering-hidden dream world was defined for me only by what was missing: neither the feel of the breeze nor any sounds of life, no motion of the world, of milliseconds born and expiring with each gasp. Scorpions hid beneath rocks, invisible and silent, tortoises burrowed in their burrows, and desert-banded geckos, eyes just above the hot sand, yearned to whisk through the moonlight upon the arrival of night. But all I could feel and all that existed for me was my steed’s heavy fleeting hoof beats thumping together with the whack of my heart, Hester’s nervous cool puffs of breath on the back of my neck, and the vigilance party, adumbral, who bore down on us. My horse was fast, but burdened by two riders, he couldn’t keep up this pace for long. Without looking back, I could feel the smile of greedy anticipation on the point man’s face. We were suspended, soaring, motionless, the yellow desert expanding, breathing, suffocating.
We rode past a homemade tombstone, forgotten, flowerless, cast aside at the foot of a cliff-rise, some miner who’d failed, and who had been lucky enough to have had one friend to memorialize his failure on a rotten piece of gumwood, an epitaph I knew by heart:
Chester Jordan – A Tolerable, Loyal Fellow
Just then, a little town rose into view on the eastern horizon, a slum, a few shackly old stores and houses, some splintery saloons and a dance hall at the very furthest edge, from which I could almost see the music rising, sweeping over me like the desert heat, a guiro scraping, a vihuelo wailing, and a measure of almost blissful, tuneful weeping in that language I still do not understand. This was a hopeless town filled with men from the Mexican border, the men who chased the men who chased gold to the desert. And a few unlucky women, who came along.
We swept past the little barrio, where I was not welcome (due to an incident, so to speak, which time unfortunately prevents me from relating) and then the tents of the Shoshone Indian camp just a few yards from the barrio’s northeast edge, where I was a bit more welcome, albeit in small, carefully measured doses. A few Indians stood about in the sandy alleys between the tents. One was drinking, one was telling a story and laughing. One white-haired man raised a hand and waved as Hester and I passed, and Hester waved back, feigning good cheer.
After another extended stretch of empty desert, we finally
hit the one-street mining town of Lida, which was composed of a shaky general store, a couple of liquor shops, a post office, and an assortment of log cabins with canvas roofs that would have flapped in the wind had there been any wind. An empty stagecoach waited at the border. If you didn’t know that this town was spanking new, built on golden optimism less than a year ago, you’d swear it had been standing in this heat for a hundred years, and that the whole sorry place was fixing to collapse from decrepit old age at any moment.
I yanked on the reins, jumped off my gelding and Hester followed. I smacked my horse and off he ran. We dashed into a little doggery called Scott & Fitzgerald’s Saloon[5], a little doggery with dust and sand on the floor and a rough, crumbling wooden bar crowded with sweaty miners cussing and crying with the dust in their eyes, and, as he always did at these moments, fat, old Fitzgerald, his hair and face gray like manufactory smog, tossed me a horn of his famous anti-fogmatic (strong and uncouth and so tempting, like the women who lingered in the shadows of his doggery), which I downed on credit as Hester and I ran straight through the back door, which squeaked and rattled and banged on leather hinges rotted near-through.
There my horse awaited us in a world that looked almost the same but felt off-the-reel different.
It was a little hotter, but that warn’t all.
Different decades feel different on the skin, and this was a different decade.
Hester noticed it too, and in spite of her fear, she was excited. This was, I guess, what she had expected when she’d knocked on my door, something like this.
“Are we roamin’?” she asked, her face alight. Sweat glistened frantically on her brow. “Are we roamin’, Watt O’Hugh the Third?”
I nodded, and I asked her to keep her voice down.
“The desert looks yellower in the future,” she marveled.
“We just need a little Time,” I said. “A little Time to think, to plan. To understand how you know my name, what you know about my ghosts, what you need with me, and who that posse are. And how in the Hell you know about roaming.”
She nodded, but she was still not serious, scared someplace in the back of her mind, but still giddy.
“They’ll be waiting for us when we get back,” I cautioned her, “still galloping after us, still thinking about doing whatever it is to you that they were thinking about doing when we left. Even if we stayed here in the future for fifty years, they’d still be right there when we got back.”
I grunted at my horse, and he followed Hester and me up over the top of a little dune-like hill, and then back down to the bottom on the other side.
I stopped walking.
A paved, two-lane interstate highway lay a few yards ahead of us, and, about a quarter mile to the east, the highway forked, and a narrow side road wound north, ending at a gleaming white building, two stories, with reddish blue trim that matched the sky. In the far west, a red horseless carriage sped towards us, just a dot in the distance now, like a tiny coronal loop on the setting sun. The horseless carriage was one of those sporty little convertibles, and this was 1981.[6]
I tried to smile, and I explained briefly about automobiles, and then we patiently awaited Hester Smith’s first automobile sighting. A few moments later the little red car swept past, stirring up sand and dust. The top was down, and the bald man in the driver’s seat had a peeling sunburn on the top of his head. A woman sat in the passenger seat, and her hair flapped about. Her nose was red like the car.
Hester watched the convertible vanish into the east, her eyes wide. She watched and watched till it was a dot again, and then it vanished.
“When you cross the street in the future,” I cautioned, “always be sure to look both ways first.”
We crossed the highway and trudged along at the edge of the side road, Hester and the horse following my lead.
“Horseless carriages,” Hester mused. Then she said, slowly, syllable-by-syllable: “Aw-toe-mo-beel ….”
And now she smiled, and just as I had recognized her desperation when she kicked in my door, this smile I recognized too, an indescribable, ineffably familiar something-or-other, a longer-ago, many-years-lost-friend, the smile of hopeful joy. How I have missed you, hopeful joy.
She laughed, and she looked over at me.
“Car,” she said, and she laughed again.
The little desert resort across the road was called the “Death Spa,” jarringly named for the desert valley in which it sat. A future owner was destined to rename the spa some years later, in 2003, after its bankruptcy, corporate takeover and reorganization. But I was always happy to visit the Death Spa, because this was 1981, and in 1981, I was (or rather, I will be) quite completely dead, and even utterly decomposed for decades, and what other establishment so heartily welcomed the long-dead as customers? This was the only one, as far as I knew, and so I was really at home here.
We passed the little one-room gift shop, the gas pumps, and the quarter-full parking lot. Hester touched a silver 1971 Pontiac Catalina, and it burned her hand. She looked sheepish, and she reddened, but then she touched it again, gingerly, and it burned her again. She looked away from me and didn’t meet my gaze.
A man with a monocle and a silver-tipped cane hobbled out of the front entrance of the spa, handed me a manila envelope– such things as manila envelopes are quite common in the 1980s – and walked across the street, never speaking a word to me nor casting me a meaningful glance. In the distance, he faded into a glistening mirage. He was not a man of the 1980s and had no desire to make any pretense of it. I had never seen him before, and I would never see him again.
I folded the envelope and stuffed it into my jacket pocket.
“Do you want to see what that is?” Hester asked.
“I know what it is.”
The entrance to the “Death Spa” was a long corridor. The man at the front desk was named Pete, although his nametag said “Mike.”
Pete was a thin uncomfortable young man in a thin uncomfortable old tie.
Pete had the kind of beard that made him look from a distance as though he were smiling, even though he was frowning, and the kind of beard that, when he was smiling close-up, made him look as though he were frowning. So whenever I entered the Death Spa tunnel, I met a false friendliness, and when I reached the front desk, he rebuffed me with an unintended surliness.
Pete’s beard frowned.
“Mr. Darcy!” he exclaimed happily and, it seemed to Hester, inexplicably. “Room for two?” he asked, through his beard’s frown.
Astonishing. Without even a disapproving glance Hester’s way. Times would change, between 1878 and 1981. And then more and more and more. And even more. Just wait.
Hester blushed.
I shook my head.
“Just want to tie up my horse, let the lady and me splash our faces and drink some beet juice inside. We’ve got some plotting and scheming to attend to. Evil is at hand.”
I whispered to Hester not to worry, beet juice would taste passable with a whisper of whiskey past the whiskers, and Pete laughed, as though I were joking (which I warn’t). I asked him how much credit I had left, and he quoted to me a bulger of a figure that made Hester gasp, though I noted to her that it didn’t buy as much beet juice in 1981 as it would have done in 1878, and Pete laughed again, just humoring a paying customer with a bit of credit.
We settled into my regular shadowy candle-lit table overlooking the “Olympic-sized swimming pool” (whatever that means).
“Why are you known as ‘Mr. Darcy’ in 1981?” Hester asked me now, and I replied that while it wasn’t a long story, it was a story that I was nevertheless disinclined to tell her, but I didn’t even manage to spike the beet juice before Pete ran back in, his beard smiling and his brow furrowed with worry.
Well, as it turns out, the point man of the posse had swept the whole gang of soaplocks through Time and was now right out front of the spa, installed in the parking lot and determined to import to the 1980s the sort of peck of troubles t
ypical of old-timey Western malefactors.
I hurried from the bar, beet juice clenched in my left hand, Hester close behind me.
There he was, on a black stallion, dressed in a long black frock coat, black pantaloons, black boots. He had white white skin, taut and smooth and hairless, and bright-red smiling lips. His eyes were pink and beady, plaguily evil. Between cusses, he chanted in some sort of foreign tongue. His gang sat on their horses, cackling and spitting, and every once in a while shooting into the air. Whooping, at appropriately dramatic intervals.
“He’s the devil that’s after you?” I asked Hester.
She said that she was afraid so. He’d tracked her from Utah, up through California, and here he was, even chasing her into the future. She had spotted him once in Cripple Creek, and he had frightened her. When she saw him again in Bodie, this worried her more. He was not a man who faded into the Western sun.
“I don’t think he took a decidedly urgent interest in my actions,” she said, “until I headed in your direction.”
I shook my head angrily. This black-white beast was one of the chief nightmares I had mizzled to the desert to escape.
Pete put a hand on my shoulder.
“Look, Mr. Darcy,” he said. “This can’t go on.”
He liked a bit of harmless character and a little inoffensive mystique around the Death Spa. But he had customers coming in on a charter bus in 30 minutes, looking forward to two days of carrot juice, massages, clean air, heat-cure and whatnot.
I had never heard of a “charter bus,” but regardless of that, I could not disagree with his concerns, and I turned to Hester.
“I recognize him too,” I said to her. “His name is Monsieur Rasháh. But he may not really be French. I suspect he’s from Hell, not Paris.”
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 2
